Edited by Sylvie Hancil, Tine Breban and José Vicente Lozano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 202] 2018
► pp. 55–74
German mal is the reduced version of einmal, i.e. of a construction combining the numeral ‘one’ with a noun originally denoting a salient local unit and later salient temporal units (occasions, frequency). The final stage of the development was a process of desemanticization of the frequency use from ‘minimal frequency’ to ‘minimal effort’.
This article pursues the following goals:
to analyze a discourse marker in German (i.e. mal), both diachronically and synchronically, that has never received a coherent and convincing analysis so far and has no clear counterpart in neighboring languages;
to show that a highly similar pattern and target of grammaticalization can be found in Mandarin Chinese (i.e. yíxià);
to argue that similarities in processes of grammaticalization may be due to cognitive principles, rather than to contact or genealogical affiliation.